Behind the soda fountain, a large sign reads “Be Nice or LEAVE” in black, white and orange, the same colors you’d see on a closed sign hanging from a shop door or on the cover of a Penguin Classic. Nearby are posters of the Columbia Women’s Basketball Team, a few years out of date. By the counter, an illustration of Kramer shares space with a motley array of police department patches from far-flung cities like Skokie, IL, and Winnipeg, MB. There are a few signed posters, and some caricatures of the cast on the wall toward the narrow bathroom. They didn’t remodel to look like the show’s version of the place.
While Tom’s recognizes its debt to Seinfeld, it’s not a shrine to the show that made it famous. But once I stepped inside, it looked like nothing like that classic sitcom setting. When I entered for the first time, I’ll admit that, yes, I could almost hear that goofy slap-bass theme over the Broadway traffic. Its blue-and-red neon sign runs the length of the facade, wrapping around Broadway to West 112th Street in an unusual way, so that if you stand on the corner it reads “Tom’s Restaurant Restaurant.” The shots inside the diner were filmed in a studio, but that doesn’t stop people from making the trek uptown to see it.Īfter a decade in New York, I’ve frequently passed by Tom’s and always dismissed it as a curious and minor tourist attraction, like Magnolia Bakery or all of Times Square. The diner is the setting of many of the show’s most famous scenes, including the very meta one where George pitches Jerry on making a show “about nothing.” At the risk of triggering a “well, actually” from the vigilant r/Seinfeld mods, I’d say there’s at least one establishing shot of Tom’s Restaurant in nearly every episode of Seinfeld. In other words, Tom’s is where these fictional New Yorkers do what New Yorkers do best. Monk’s Café is where Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer convene over greasy food to complain about everything and everyone. It’s a diner in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, but it’s best known as the facade for the diner from Seinfeld. What else does one do in the land of Seinfeld? It seemed like an appropriate argument to have, almost like we were culturally obligated to gripe about nothing. I reassured a waitress several times, but she remained skeptical that anybody was coming, let alone that I’d order anything, and made me keep standing.
There were plenty of places for me to sit, but I had to wait. Several parties-of-one were scattered among the stools along the counter. Sure, the point of a restaurant in New York City is to try and get customers in and out as fast as possible to turn the table over to the next guests, but it was quiet for lunchtime. I found myself waiting for my friend Seth to arrive, and could tell it made the waitstaff nervous. Today, we travel to the Upper West Side to check out the food at the real-life version of the diner the gang frequented. Peterman, and the show’s connection to a famous lingerie brand. To kick things off, we looked at the past, present and future of the real-life catalog that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character worked for, J. To celebrate three decades of George, Elaine, Kramer and Jerry, InsideHook will be sharing stories about the show’s lasting impression on fashion, comedy and American culture all week. The “show about nothing” went on to become one of the most iconic television shows of all time. Thirty years ago this month, a sitcom about a quartet of New Yorkers made its debut on NBC.
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